Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual

Being Gorgeous explores the ways in which extravagance, flamboyance and dressing up can open up possibilities for women to anarchically play around with familiar stereotypical tropes of femininity. Whether through pastiche, parody, or pure pleasure, Willson discusses how artists, artistes and indeed the spectators themselves can operate in excess of the restrictive images which saturate our visual culture. By reference to a wide spectrum of examples from our current ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture, including Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Matthew Barney, Naked Girls Reading, Dr Sketchy’s, Audacity Chutzpah, Burly Q and Carnesky’s Ghost Train, this publication demonstrates how contemporary female performers embody, critique and thoroughly relish their own representation by inappropriately re-appropriating femininity.

This is protest through play – a pleasurable misbehaviour that perhaps reflects a feminism for the 21st century – where women are playing up a clichéd spectacle in order to wrest back control over their sensual, sexual selves as subject and as image.